He says he has been perpetually on the brink
of the sort of intercourse he wanted, and yet never
completely attained it. And what else had he to expect when
he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down
into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket
match; and even then not simply for the pleasure of the
thing, but with some afterthought of self-improvement, as
though you had come to the cricket match to bet. It was his
theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that
their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they
anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be
something else than a society for mutual improvement -
indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some extent
unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a
manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he saw his
friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We
might remind him of his own words about love: "We should have
no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that
business. But commonly men have not imagination enough to be
thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a
barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading oriental philosophers. It
is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact
that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving
intimacy impossible.
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